“Thanks, Captain, but you can’t spend any more time looking for Joe. The lab is our top priority.” Noting the frustrated look on the captain’s face, he added, “Don’t worry about Joe. He pops up when you least expect him.”

Austin studied the atoll’s location, wondering what had attracted Zavala to the tiny speck of land, and then punched in the Trouts’ number on his cell phone. Gamay answered.

“Kurt! Thank goodness you called. We’ve been worried. What’s going on?”

“We had a run-in with one of the Triad leaders in Nan Madol. Guy named Chang. The Triad had an informant. We’re back on the Concord, but now Joe is missing. Captain Dixon said Joe borrowed a helicopter and went off to check out an atoll.”

“We gave him the atoll’s coordinates,” Gamay said. “It’s located approximately where Trouble Island was, the place Captain Dobbs stopped at with his whale ship a hundred fifty years ago.”

“You found the logbook?” Austin asked.

“No,” she said. “You’re not the only one who’s discovered that the Triad has a long reach. We contacted a book dealer who said he had a lead on the log, but someone killed him and tried to jump us. We got away by the skin of our teeth.”

“Glad to hear that,” Austin said with relief. “I’m puzzled, though. If you didn’t find the log, where did you dig up the information about the atoll?”

Gamay told Austin about Perlmutter’s lead to Caleb Nye, the visits to the Dobbs mansion and Brimmer’s store, and finding Brimmer’s body in the old mill. Austin fumed as he listened to the details of Brimmer’s murder and the attempt to ambush the Trouts. Even without Dr. Huang, the vast criminal organization seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere. He asked for the longitude and latitude coordinates from Nye’s diorama and said he would check them out immediately.

“What do you want us to do in the meantime?” Gamay asked.

“Call Sandecker and bring him up to speed,” Austin said. “I’ll get back to you when I know more.”

Austin signed off with a quick thank-you, then sat down in front of a computer and called up a satellite image on the monitor using Nye’s coordinates. Nineteenth-century navigation was not exactly precise, and the atoll Austin saw on the screen didn’t match the position on the map.